Ivor
Morris
has written on Shakespearean tragedy, and on Jane Austen’s Novels in Jane Austen & the Interplay of Character (1999). He is the author of
“Hamlet, King of Denmark,” an alternative tragicomical ending to Shakespeare’s play (première at the King’s Head Theatre, London, 2001) yet to be incorporated in a full
Hamlet production.

“Westgate Buildings!”
said he; “and who is Miss Anne Elliot to be visiting in Westgate Buildings?
– A Mrs. Smith. A widow Mrs. Smith, - and who was her husband? One of the five
thousand Mr. Smiths whose names are to be met with every where… A poor widow,
barely able to live, between thirty and forty – a mere Mrs. Smith, an every
day Mrs. Smith, of all people and names in the world, to be the chosen friend of
Miss Anne Elliot, and to be preferred by her, to her own family connections
among the nobility of England and Ireland! Mrs. Smith, such a name!” (157-58)

The
expostulation of Sir Walter Elliot in response to his daughter’s declining
Lady Dalrymple’s invitation in order to visit a former school friend in
reduced circumstances. This demonstration of the full flow of his rhetorical and
indeed intellectual powers does no more than confirm to the reader the first
half of Admiral Croft’s earlier observation, that “the baronet will never
set the Thames on fire”; but the other half, that “there seems no harm in
him,” is disproved by the tirade’s so wounding the feelings of the otherwise
self-possessed Mrs. Clay as to make it impossible for her to stay in the room.
In terms of the fortunes of its auditors, it is a far more potent pronouncement
than immediately appears. Well considered, it might be found to constitute a
turning point in the story.

Not
that there is a great deal of substance in the remark; it would have been
surprising if there were. True enough, when the author wishes to attribute the
status of a nobody to one of her characters, Smith is the surname she seems to
fall back upon – as with Emma Woodhouse’s protégée Harriet, parlour-boarder
at Mrs. Goddard’s school, and illegitimate daughter of a “respectable
tradesman”. But, the matter of status apart, the name itself demonstrably
signifies little, if anything. In the course of the novel, Harriet displays such
qualities of simplicity, good-nature and tenderness as can cause Emma on
occasion to believe Harriet her superior, and capable of attaching men of wealth
and social pretension. Roused by Mr. Knightley’s attack on their friendship as
an impropriety, she not only asserts that “‘such a girl as Harriet is
exactly what every man delights in,’” but tells him, “‘Were you,
yourself, ever to marry, she is the very woman for you’” (64). Nor, as the
world goes, does her opinion greatly err. What reader of Emma would deny
Harriet’s natural and touching dignity towards the close, when she confides
her hopes of Knightley’s heart – or would at that point reject as a
possibility what Emma, despite her every wish, cannot bring herself to do? The
novel’s force and poignancy owe much to its revelation that Harriet the nobody
has the capability of being a somebody.

The
conclusion must be – is it not part of the truth Jane Austen is presenting to
us? – that, as it is with her Christian names, so with the surnames, they are
in themselves no guide to the assessment of personality, or necessarily of
social standing: that, in fact, the rose given another name, or placed within a
different category, will smell as sweet. And of this there is corroboration in
the other Smith in the novels: the very Mrs. Smith to whom Sir Walter Elliot
without knowing her is moved to take such strong objection. Despite her being
through poverty and misfortune resident in the unthinkable Westgate Buildings,
she shows herself in manners, mind, and disposition to be indisputably a lady,
and even Anne’s superior by right of seniority and knowledge of the world.

This,
if a possible doubt – and a serious one – can first be laid to rest.It concerns her deliberately withholding the knowledge of Mr. Elliot’s
past unfeeling and invidious behaviour from the friend she believes all but
engaged to him in his new situation and persona. When the confidence is at last
bestowed, there is amongst Anne’s varied emotions so strong a puzzlement at
its not having been forthcoming, and, more, at Mrs. Smith’s having “seemed
to recommend and praise” Mr. Elliot in the interim, that, well-mannered as she
is, she cannot withhold an exclamation of surprise. Is she not justified? Can
there be anything admirable in default upon so vital an issue, and whatever
might lie behind it?

On
the face of it, Mrs. Smith’s behavior is inconsistent. Instead of the needful
communication, Anne has been offered a series of oblique queries and surmises
all oddly indicating approval of the approaching marriage. She hopes and trusts
her dear Miss Elliot “will be very happy.” When might she speak of it as
settled: “Next week?” Why should Miss Elliot be “cruel” enough to affect
indifference to Mr. Elliot? Where would she “look for a more suitable
match,” or “expect a more gentlemanlike, agreeable man?” The change to
incommunicativeness and silence that succeeds makes all the more shocking the
vehemence of Mrs. Smith’s denunciation when it bursts forth:

“Mr.
Elliot is a man without heart or conscience; a designing, wary, cold-blooded
being, who thinks only of himself; who, for his own interest or ease, would be
guilty of any cruelty, or any treachery, that could be perpetrated without risk
of his general character. . . . He is totally beyond the reach of any sentiment
of justice or compassion. Oh! he is black at heart, hollow and black!” (199)

It
should not escape us, however, that, no sooner are these accusations out of her
mouth, than Mrs. Smith is begging her startled friend to “allow for an injured
woman.” In this recognition of her conduct having gone beyond decorous bounds,
might we detect awareness that the position she is taking towards the person who
has provoked it is likewise extreme? What, after all, are the offences she has
taxed him with? We should do well to inquire, and consider whether they amount
to what the poet might term “direct villainy.”

There
are a number of offences. In his early years, Elliot had been guilty of a
spendthrift style of living, and of an inclination also undeniable to escape
from the trammelling constraints and expectations imposed by the accident of
birth. His having found Sir Walter insufferable, insulting as this might seem to
Anne Elliot, would elsewhere be deemed a sign of discernment and good taste. The
desire to marry for money which subsequently motivated him, while naturally
censurable, was one of those things which even Mrs. Smith admitted to be “too
common” for outright condemnation, and which so discriminating a young woman
as Elizabeth Bennet could view to be allowable in “A man in distressed
circumstances,” as Elliot was then by Mrs. Smith’s account. The fact of his
unkindness to his first wife, blemish though it be, Mrs. Smith is from personal
knowledge in a position to explain, and excuse. All these faults, while they
show Mr. Elliot to be deserving of the title homme moyen sensuel, do not
mark him down as a villain.

The
monstrosity in his nature, if that is what it is, resides in his stern and
unpitying refusal to come to the newly widowed Mrs. Smith’s aid, after the
bankruptcy and death of the husband who had been his close friend. Estimable in
any light such conduct cannot be; but in a certain light it could be seen as
defensible. Now affluent, having, as Mrs. Smith puts it, “‘long had as much
money as he could spend, nothing to wish for on the side of avarice or
indulgence’” (206), he has with the passing of years become intent upon the
dignity destined for him in the future baronetcy. With entire propriety,
therefore, he had proceeded to drop his former acquaintance upon her
impoverishment and loss of social status: her becoming, so to speak, a mere
Smith. In acting thus he had reverted to type and class: had “given her up,”
in the common phrase, with as little thought or compunction as Lady Bertram gave
up the sister who had so “disobliged her family” as to bestow her affections
upon a Lieutenant of Marines – or as Emma would have had to give up her dear
Harriet if she had accepted Mr. Martin’s letter of proposal.

Elliot’s
conduct had been deeply wounding and humiliating, deserving, perhaps, of a term
like inhumanity; certainly in the estimation of Anne Elliot, face to face as she
was now with grief and despair in her friend. But was she truly in any position
to judge? Had she not, it might be asked, herself been guilty of inflicting real
suffering, and upon much the same principle, in giving up her friend and lover,
Frederick Wentworth, for the sake of “the independence which alone had been
wanting”? And done so, in a daughter’s more dependent situation, through
conformity with the wisdom of that age, and of its spokesman in the figure of
Lady Russell? The grief occasioned had not been his alone. Anne had borne a
burden of sorrow long thereafter; but, at the time, she had “had to encounter
all the additional pain of opinions, on his side, totally unconvinced and
unbending, and of his feeling himself ill-used by so forced a relinquishment”
(28). While still of course exercising fitting restraint, might he not in his
exasperation have harbored the very supposition Mrs. Smith was to entertain of
another, that Anne, like Mr. Elliot was “‘without heart or conscience, a
designing, wary, cold-blooded being who thinks only of [her]self’” (199)?
What he did say, we are left to surmise; but to judge by what we know of his
disposition, his parting comments will have been reasonably explicit; and, once
having uttered them, he certainly showed no disposition to linger. When he
reappears after a long interval, the affront still rankles in him.

So
it is with Mrs. Smith, too; but she is sufficiently aware of her world, and has
lived in it long enough, to know that, while Mr. Elliot’s behaviour was
reprehensible, he did not and could not exemplify the charge she has made
against him. Her knowledge is Jane Austen’s own. Readers and critics can be
excused for sometimes forgetting, in the midst of being so well entertained,
that in her novels she was writing not about novels but about life: where, as
her fanciful Catherine Morland was brought perforce to admit, it is not a
question of persons either being “as spotless as an angel” or “hav[ing]
the [disposition] of a fiend,” but of their partaking of “a general . . .
mixture of good and bad” (NA 200).In ordinary social intercourse, some may incur our dislike, a few perhaps
justifiably our ire; but we should be unfortunate indeed to find ourselves
confronted with a Montoni.

Through
most of that decisive interview in her noisy parlour, however, Mr. Elliot was
not Mrs. Smith’s chief concern, though having been her first. The extremity of
her need had made her resolve upon a renewed application, through Anne, to the
man who had once spurned her appeal for help; but the presence of this very Miss
Elliot was soon to impose upon her a problem far more critical and urgent:
nothing less than that of making or marring the life’s happiness of the friend
she had rejoiced so unexpectedly to encounter. The engagement which she had
gathered from all the indications to be about to take place, though apparently
not yet a settled thing, was still very likely to happen; and she must now
immediately decide whether, and by what right, she might take it upon herself to
ensure that it never did.

In
that ceremonious age, marriage was deemed not the product of romance, but a
matter of family alliance. Within the bounds of her experience it would have
been all but impossible for Mrs. Smith to have come upon a match of greater
acceptability to the two immediately concerned, or to their family and
acquaintances, who were from her certain information delighted at the prospect.
All Anne’s disavowals notwithstanding, the betrothal seemed near; in her
features glowed the radiance of a young woman deeply in love. It betokened also
the funds of future happiness which, despite the reservations Mrs. Smith
entertained, might well be in store for the pair. For her merely to mention them
would be a work of negation: of the destruction of possibility, with
consequences unknown.

In
its every detail, her subsequent conduct incurs no fault. First, dismissal of
the subject of her previous friendship with Mr. Elliot: “‘It is a great
while since we met,’” she tells Anne(194). Next comes the hesitation, and
the inconsequential remarks often indicative of profound thought, to be followed
by those inferences and refined delvings as to the state of Anne’s emotions,
legitimate in the circumstances, through which she hopes to arrive at a
certainty. Then the composed responses to the rallying liveliness of Anne’s
inquiries, the less-than-polite short answers, and, finally, the muteness to
which she is driven. But not before Anne, in her embarrassment at what was being
asked of her, has made clear that her feelings relate to someone else, that
“‘it is not Mr. Elliot that—’” (197); and Mrs. Smith, in sensitive and
mannered reaction, has instantly accepted her word, “and with all the
semblance of seeing nothing beyond.”

Almost
as soon, her decision has been made, and she is talking “in her natural tone
of cordiality” (198): asking pardon, confessing her previous uncertainty as to
what to do, pleading the dislike any decent person feels “‘to be officious,
to be giving bad impressions, making mischief’” in the lives of others, and,
at last, speaking without reserve her condemnation of the man by whom she has
been wronged. The account is lengthy; by the time it is over her mood has
changed to a considerate solemnity. The last we hear from her, drawn forth by
Anne’s wonderment at her first seeming commendation of Mr. Elliot, deserves
not to be ignored:

“My dear,” was Mrs.
Smith’s reply, “there was nothing else to be done. I considered your
marrying him as certain, though he might not yet have made the offer, and I
could no more speak the truth of him, than if he had been your husband. My heart
bled for you, as I talked of happiness. And yet, he is sensible, he is
agreeable, and with such a woman as you, it was not absolutely hopeless. He was
very unkind to his first wife. They were wretched together. But she was too
ignorant and giddy for respect, and he had never loved her. I was willing to
hope that you must fare better.” (211)

For
Mrs. Smith to have come through so severe and agonizing a test of friendship as
this is nothing less than a triumph of good sense and good breeding. Where in
the novels is there to be found a better example of sensitivity, discretion,
principle, and kindness?

None
would deny that the surname of Smith, which Sir Walter finds so offensively
plebeian, is undistinguished: but there is another name in Persuasion which,
if anything, is even more so. Not that it is borne by so many persons; but, in
respect of the associations of the word, what can be commoner than Clay—the
name Jane Austen accords to the widowed daughter of Sir Walter’ steward,
frequent visitor at Kellynch Hall, and long-term resident in Camden Place. From
these particulars a somewhat unfortunate juxtaposition might be deduced. But the
lady is a rung or two up the social ladder in her father’s being a lawyer –
a minor profession, at least, despite its provoking the merriment of Caroline
Bingley and Mrs. Hurst at Netherfield Hall, and the scorn of Emma Woodhouse for
its representative in Highbury, the pert William Cox. In the novels’ world,
Mrs. Clay might be no more than on a par with Elizabeth Bennet’s rather
deplorable uncle Phillips: but she is also the equal of Elizabeth’s first love
and eventual brother-in-law, George Wickham, the possessor of manners more
engaging than those of Mr. Darcy, and of social powers far more
considerable.

In
these latter respects, Mrs. Clay on her first appearance is as impressive. Quite at
her ease in the rarefied atmosphere of Kellynch, she is as ready to promote her
father’s interests by extolling the virtues of a sailor tenant, as to
contradict the baronet in mock remonstrance at his strictures upon the Navy,
with her, “‘Nay, Sir Walter, this is being severe indeed. Have a
little mercy on the poor men. We are not all born to be handsome’” (20).
Clearly, a pronounced if not laudable ability is being displayed, in that this
and her other challenges are at the same time instinct with flattery. Having
gone through the list of occupations, with their blighting effects upon the
practitioners, she turns to the situation of “‘those who are not obliged to
follow any, who can live in a regular way, in the country, choosing their own
hours, following their own pursuits, and living on their own property, without
the torment of trying for more,’” the halcyon leisure of the privileged: and
concludes with the splendid compliment, “‘it is only their lot, I
say, to hold the blessings of health and good appearance to the utmost”
(20-21). Could her words be other than music to the vain Sir Walter’s ears?

A
lively and spirited personality is before us. It does not give evidence of the
wit and brilliancy of, say, a Mary Crawford, but shows itself possessed of
intellect as powerful as hers. And also, in the processes of conversation, an
elegance. If to a degree the speech is an indication of the person, then in the
style of the words just quoted, or in her observation that “‘even in the
quieter professions, there is a toil and labour of the mind, if not of the body,
which seldom leaves a man’s looks to the natural effect of time” (20), rings
evidence of Mrs. Clay’s being someone worthy of note. But what greater proof
can there be, than the fact of her having gained the friendship of the haughty
Elizabeth Elliot, and suspicion of arousing the ardour of Sir Walter himself –
who, in urging her to prolong her stay in his house, can so surprisingly yet
deservedly pay tribute to her “fine mind”?

This
application was the very last thing his neighbour Lady Russell would have
approved. Mrs. Clay’s association with the Kellynch family was, for her, “an
intimacy, which she wished to see interrupted”, a friendship “quite out of
place” (15). Due allowance must be made for the “prejudices on the side of
ancestry” which, Jane Austen informs us, could have the effect of narrowing
her sympathies. Whether the estimate of Mrs. Clay as “a clever young woman,
who understood the art of pleasing; the art of pleasing, at least, at Kellynch-hall”
is that of Lady Russell or the author herself is impossible to determine (15);
but in the sight of the former, the lady is “a very unequal, and in her
character she believed a very dangerous companion” for Elizabeth who ought to
have been “nothing to her but the object of distant civility” (16).

However,
in the scope of the novel as a whole, this judgment, or the thinking which leads
to it, cannot be sound: for, eight years before, Lady Russell had made a similar
objection, for pretty much the same reasons, to the man Anne Elliot finally
marries. Wentworth she had seen as an unequal companion in his being entirely
lacking in wealth; and the very self-confidence through which he was thereafter
to amass a fortune “added a dangerous character to himself” (27). In short,
“She deprecated the connexion in every light” and prevailed on Anne to end
it. Wrong as she has proved about him, can she now be right about Mrs. Clay?

Nevertheless,
Lady Russell’s opinion is one Anne shares and maintains unyieldingly
throughout. She feels “quite as keenly” as the older woman the
inappropriateness of the plan for Mrs. Clay to accompany her father and sister
to Bath, especially in view of Sir Walter’s susceptibility, and is moved by
the threat to his family to warn Elizabeth of it; and her immediate concern upon
coming to Bath is to ascertain whether he was by now in love with Mrs. Clay. She
is naturally more knowledgeable than Lady Russell, and also more observant. She
well knew her father’s propensity to be constantly “making severe remarks”
in her absence upon Mrs. Clay’s freckles and projecting tooth and clumsy
wrist: but the charm of her being “decidedly altogether well-looking” Anne
still does not underestimate (34). But she has sensed an attribute far more
potent, in her possessing “in an acute mind and assiduous pleasing manners,
infinitely more dangerous attractions than any merely personal might have
been” (34). Intellectually and socially, Mrs. Clay is a gifted being – a
fact which must strongly influence the attitude Anne adopts towards her.

Is
there a fear in Anne Elliot of being put in the shade? In a sense, this had
already happened, long before Mrs. Clay’s advent; and long ago, also, she had
“become hardened” to the state. For temperamental and other reasons, Anne
was odd man out in that family – was “nobody with either father or sister:
her word had no weight; her convenience was always to give way” (5). She is a
steady, serious character, in manner gentle and self-effacing; it is typical of
her that, much as she is minded to reply upon her father’s reproof at her
visits in Westgate Buildings, she says nothing.

Whenever
she speaks at length, it appears that she does so by effort. She is happier and
more herself in making what is best described as minimal comment, though it is
not insignificant that a quiet remark from her can be unusually forceful. In
contrast to Mrs. Clay’s long speeches in defence of the Navy, Anne’s mild
observation that they “‘have at least an equal claim with any other set
of men’” not only commands respect, but serves to direct the conversation
(19). In the very different setting of the windy Cobb after Louisa’s fall,
when the party are transfixed with horror, Anne’s words, again sparing, are of
instant effect, for they proceed from a clear and resolute understanding.
“‘A surgeon!’” precipitates action; “‘Captain Benwick, would it not
be better for Captain Benwick?” a change of plan (110). When, at the
Harville’s, she is obliged to affirm her willingness to stay and look after
Louisa, it is done as briefly as courtesy will permit. Rather than springing
from any sense of inadequacy, this reserve in Anne Elliot seems the sign of a
personal integrity and assurance.

The
same may be said concerning that helpfulness of disposition which is as constant
in her as it is unaffected. It is not just out of duty, but evidently with
pleasure that she has industriously made catalogues of the books and pictures at
Kellynch, sorted out the plants to be taken or left, and gone to almost every
house in the parish as a take-leave. Again, her instinct when the newly engaged
Henrietta confides her anxieties about her husband’s future is a readiness
“to do good” by entering interestedly into the subject, acquiescing in
Henrietta’s sentiments and wishes, and adding kindly encouragement of her own.
And, on her coming to stay at Kellynch Lodge, and hearing Lady Russell
discoursing upon the Kellynch family’s concerns when her own thoughts were
engrossed by the people at Lyme, and the friendship of the Harvilles and Captain
Benwick, she consciously makes the exertion which courtesy demands, to be able
“to meet Lady Russell with any thing like the appearance of equal solicitude,
on topics which had by nature the first claim on her” (124). All this is
simple good manners, of course, but it is also genuine good will: the two are
not very dissimilar.

In
the ordinary course of events, Anne Elliot’s reactions always tend to be
natural and right, often even laudable. Upon visiting the Crofts at Kellynch
after they have taken possession, she gives no thought to her own family’s
loss: she “could but in conscience feel that they were gone who deserved not
to stay” (125). The Admiral’s wayward and sometimes brusque manners do not
obscure for her that “goodness of heart” in which she takes such delight;
though his perplexity at the number of mirrors in her father’s room, and their
declaring him “‘a rather dressy man for his time of life,’” leaves her,
while amused in spite of herself, apprehensively “rather distressed for an
answer” (128). The barely suppressed grief of Captain Harville, as he speaks
of the sister so recently lost, is met with her suggestion, comforting though it
be commonplace, “‘but in time, perhaps – we know what time does in every
case of affliction’” (108). By the thought, when first she is in Westgate
Buildings, of the instances of selflessness and fortitude in human nature at its
noblest which must pass before those who nurse the sick, Anne is moved; and in
the crippled Mrs. Smith’s cheerfulness, her power of transforming an evil into
good, she reverently finds “the choicest gift of Heaven.”

Such
sentiments, if not novel, have nothing of the pretentious about them, but are
entirely just. And the same holds true of Anne’s responses in encounters with
the opposite sex: while properly modest, they are in no way missish. Finding
herself being very directly complimented by Mr. Elliot during the interval of
the concert, she reacts blushingly with an attempt to change the conversation:
“‘For shame, for shame! – this is too much of flattery. I forget what we
are to have next,’ turning to the bill” (187).But she will restrain neither her pleasure nor her inquiries at Charles
Musgrove’s news of Captain Benwick’s admiring her exceedingly, despite
Mary’s graceless disparagement of the idea; and from that time her head is
full of the thought of meeting or seeing him again. And why not?

What
distinguishes Anne’sbehavior
from that of a Catherine Morland
in her inexperience, and of an Elizabeth Bennet in her capacity to be misled by
her spirits, is the implicit conformity to standards which never fails her:
standards of decorum, needless to say, and also of morality. The briefest of
chance meetings with a stranger at a seaside inn reveal him, “by the readiness
and propriety of his apologies” (104), to be a befitting object for her
approval and interest. But the excellent manners of this person prove
insufficient seriously to recommend him. In themselves they are pleasing to her,
as they are commendable by the precepts of her day; but beyond them, she cannot
be satisfied that she really knows his character. Hints of bad habits, of a past
carelessness on serious matters, arise from further acquaintance with him; and
though in mature years he might have come to think differently, what, she asks
herself, were now his sentiments – and “How could it ever be ascertained
that his mind was truly cleansed?” (161).

We
are dealing here with an engaging severity, not unlike that sometimes displayed
by Fanny Price, but wider-ranging and better informed: with a conceptual kind of
thinking, in fact, of sufficient depth to be able, when occasion demands, to
capture the essence of that age’s outlook, and state it with admirable
conciseness. Consider the advice Anne Elliot gives to young Captain Benwick,
impassioned as he allows himself to become, that evening at the Harville’s,
under the influence of a broken heart and the tenderest outpourings of Scott and
Byron: that she considers it poetry’s misfortune “to be seldom safely
enjoyed by those who enjoy it completely; and that the strong feelings which
alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it
but sparingly” (100-01). Is it not the voice of the eighteenth century itself
that we are hearing in her dictum – or in the recommendation that Benwick
apply himself instead to the study of works of morality and memoirs
“calculated to rouse and fortify the mind by the highest precepts, and the
strongest of moral and religious endurances” (101)? Unlike Fanny Price, whose
reflections, dedicated conformist though she is, show her as standing almost on
the brink of romanticism, Anne Elliot reveals herself in these speeches to be a
thoroughgoing conventionalist.

And
she is declared so by a further and yet more formidable constituent of her
nature – whose presence there is most pronounced upon occasions when it might
be expected to be least in evidence. One occasion comes as she and Wentworth,
restored to each other at last, are pacing the quiet and retired gravel-walk in
Bath, oblivious of the bustling life around them, explaining to each other
through those precious moments their past actions and feelings. Wentworth is
eloquent upon his despair during the concert at seeing her in the company of the
same Lady Russell who had before persuaded her to reject him. Anne is genuinely
surprised that he should have so misjudged. Previously, she had yielded to
persuasion on the side of safety, as was her duty; but could he not have seen
that in Bath she was not duty-bound; indeed, that in marrying a man
“indifferent” to her she would have violated duty through the risk she was
taking? Quite how Wentworth was to recognise and be sure of this indifference
she does not explain, and probably would be unable to say: but what is
transparently clear to her – and, she feels, ought to be as obvious to him –
is duty as a moving principle where she is concerned. Diplomatically enough,
Wentworth answers, “‘Perhaps I ought to have reasoned thus . . . but I could
not’” (245). We can only sympathise.

Anne
Elliot appears to be on remarkably good terms with the “Stern daughter of the
voice of God”; so much so, that she dedicates the ensuing opportunity of
tender communication to a further exposition. It is after the drawing rooms at
Camden Place have been lighted up, the company at Miss Elliot’s card party
assembled, and the two have stolen away in pretended admiration of a display of
greenhouse plants. She has been trying, she tells Wentworth, to judge her own
action in obeying Lady Russell -“‘whom,’”
she confides, “‘you will love better than you do now’” (246). And she
had been right to do so, despite the eight and a half years of separation, since
otherwise, “‘I should have suffered in my conscience.’” And, as
emphatically, she concludes:“‘I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in
human nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and if I mistake not, a strong
sense of duty is no bad part of a woman’s portion.’”

Wentworth
replies only by referring to the point of his future relationship with Lady
Russell: the disquisition itself is studiously, and one may think advisedly,
ignored. If Anne expected concurrence with the final remark, or with the
incipient self-congratulation which had gone before, none was to be forthcoming.
The reader is possibly entitled to infer from Wentworth’s silence, as well as
some suppressed alarm, the disinclination any lover would feel to encourage the
beloved in such flights into the moralistic sublime. The notion that she would
have suffered greater disquiet in being with him than the pain she had endured
in being without him is not one likely to recommend itself to the hero, whatever
satisfaction it might afford the heroine.

Perhaps
our best resort for adjudging this idiosyncrasy in Anne Elliot is to Jane Austen
herself, who, in mentioning Persuasion to her niece Fanny Knight, wrote,
“You will not like it, so you need not be impatient. You may perhaps
like the Heroine, as she is almost too good for me” (Letters 23 March
1817). Such a confession from such a source is not to be disregarded. It gains
credence from the apt comment of her biographer Elizabeth Jenkins, that, after
her initial blunder in breaking off her engagement with the man she truly loved,
Anne “never makes a single error in morality, judgement or taste”; but she
observes that her character nonetheless remains neither priggish nor unreal,
through her clear-sightedness as to her family’s failings, and the tremulous
experience of emotion’s depths and heights, which combine to “keep her
altogether vulnerable and human” (293).

Anne’s
sensitivity to the “thousand natural shocks” life has for us does to an
extent moderate, or rather reconcile us to, the goodness in question. But there
is evident in her also a predisposition no less human and humbling, which may
however properly lead us to speculate whether the “goodness” Jane Austen
comes near to reprehending in Anne Elliot is not to be regarded as somewhat more
social than moral, though pertaining to both sorts of virtues: as being rather a
correctness, in keeping with the age’s delineations as to what was ideal and
so appropriate for admiration and imitation in a young woman, while yet with
respect to the former incurring some tincture of that society’s
austerities.

At
the risk of some slight injustice to Anne, the suggestion can be made that it
might be detected in a wholly inconsequential remark of hers to Mrs. Smith, who
had asked whether she had noticed the woman who opened the door to her the
previous day. Anne’s reply is, “‘No. Was it Mrs. Speed, as usual, or the
maid? I observed no one in particular’” (197). The omission had been
innocent: it is not incumbent upon, or in the habit of, young ladies like
herself to pay any special attention to servants, or to the lower orders in
general. For this reason, the pleasure which Mrs. Smith confesses she has
derived from listening to Nurse Rooke strikes Anne as somewhat singular; but,
“far from wishing to cavil at” it, she responds, “‘Women of that class
have great opportunities, and if they are intelligent may be worth listening
to’” (155-56). Harmless truism though this be, it is at the same time in the
nature of a concession – and one from which it may be safely conjectured that
Anne has done little listening of that variety.These are incidental touches, and in themselves carry little weight; but
they are germane to the far more definite comment later on in the session,
provoked by Mrs. Smith’s inability, during the years of her early acquaintance
with Mr. Elliot, to see much wrong in his marrying for money, when this was so
common a recourse amongst the young men they then knew.“‘But was she not a very low woman?’” Anne asks (202).There is an incredulity and near expostulation in the remark, which
imparts a note of finality.It is
not insignificant that Mrs. Smith wholly accords with the sentiment.

In
this attitude, both are being correct.Even
for the rich and seemingly less fastidious Emma Woodhouse, the evident
“indifference to a confusion of rank” in Frank Churchill’s recommending a
fortnightly ball at the Crown Inn, despite the objection urged upon him of
“the want of proper families” in the neighbourhood, “ bordered upon
inelegance of mind” unacceptable in someone of his station (198).Is Anne Elliot to be blamed for sharing views so universally
held?

That
she has them is certain; but in a curious way she is made to profess a
discrepant freedom with regard to rank at variance with the otherwise
instinctive and conventional position she takes.When Mr. Elliot seeks to persuade her of the importance of their
accepting Lady Dalrymple’s preparedness to welcome them, and “‘enjoy[ing]
all the advantages of the connexion as far as possible,’” she makes the
almost heretical assertion, in intimating, “‘I suppose (smiling) I have more
pride than any of you,’” that they have been too solicitous in getting the
relationship acknowledged, and that she is and must remain “‘too proud to
enjoy a welcome which depends so entirely upon place’” (150-51).Her idea of good company she had already informed him to be
that of “‘clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of
conversation’”; and she does, to do her justice, in general show an
impatience with society’s externalities, like “the usual style of
give-and-take invitations, and dinners of formality and display” (98), and the
tedious social gatherings which were “but a mixture of those who had never met
before, and those who met too often” (245).Not that this tendency, errant though it be, will lead her too far
astray.The prospect of becoming
the next Lady Elliot through marriage with the heir presumptive, when first put
before her by her friend Lady Russell, obliges Anne to turn and walk aside and
pretend employment in the attempt to repress the feelings it creates: “For a
few moments her imagination and her heart were bewitched” (160).It is realization of the incapacity of the man in the affair to exercise
bewitchment upon her that causes the dream to disperse; rank itself, and
properly so, is under no such disqualification.

The
effect of this irregularity – or inconsistency, as it might be supposed – in
Anne’s character is to make her appear to rise above, and so to obscure, her
more ordinary attitude to the matter of rank and class.Jane Austen endows her with, as it were, a refreshing incorrectness
which, in its humanity, is safe from criticism and beyond reproach, but which
yet does not have sufficient hold to divide her from her more normal and
conventional self.Thus is
fulfilled a need in the heroine, and manifestly in the author, that Anne’s
condition of being “almost too good” does not develop into excess:that, though granted such impressive endowment of heroic charm, she will
remain “A Creature not too bright or good/For human nature’s daily
food”—particularly as regards the social attitudes she was born to.

Thus,
for all that it is undoubted and abundant in Anne Elliot, her good will may not
extend to Mrs. Clay.Instead, there
is a sophisticated vigilance that is quick to detect a fault, to fathom the
pretences she is often put to in her attentions to the family which has so
condescendingly welcomed her into their midst.She is only a visitor when we first find her with them, the reason being
– as Anne is aware of it – that her father Mr. Shepherd had driven her over,
“nothing being of so much use to Mrs. Clay’s health as a drive to Kellynch”
(18).In her eagerness to enumerate
the depredations upon men’s health and looks of professional practice, we are
informed – again, it seems, in terms of Anne’s recognition – that “she
stopt a moment to consider what might do for the clergyman” (20).These contrivances, if they are at all culpable, are trifling; but that
they are being viewed with suspicion, or scorn, cannot be denied.Such perceptions in Anne are illustrative of a dislike, or even an
antagonism, that is unrelieved to the novel’s end.Even the “pleasant and smiling” greeting she receives from Mrs. Clay
upon her coming to Bath is contemptuously regarded: “Anne had always thought
she would pretend what was proper on her arrival” (137).

Without
doubt, it is the danger she constitutes to her own and her sister’s prospects
which gives rise to this critical spirit; but the reality of the hurt is plain.Anne’s early encounters with Mrs. Clay in Camden Place are diversified
by Mr. Elliot’s frequent visits; and, as we are in due course informed,
“[H]er satisfaction in Mr. Elliot outweighed all the plague of Mrs. Clay”
(147).The term is a trifle less
than ladylike; and so perhaps is what makes Anne ready to overlook Mr.
Elliot’s lenient censure of her notions of good society:“she was pleased with him for not liking Mrs. Clay; and her conscience
admitted that his wishing to promote her father’s getting great acquaintance,
was more than excusable in the view of defeating her” (151).Being afterwards put on her guard against him by Mrs. Smith’s
revelation plunges her therefore into a rather diverting state of exasperation.

It
was bad enough that a Mrs. Clay should be always before her; but that a deeper
hypocrite should be added to their party, seemed the destruction of every thing
like peace and comfort. (215)

To
be set between a Scylla and a Charybdis in the confines of a drawing room is a
fate no one would envy.

Is
it pure alarm at “results the most serious to his family” that would follow
from her father’s marrying Mrs. Clay which causes Anne to warn Elizabeth,
“who in the event of such a reverse would be so much more pitied than
herself”?Or is there an
admixture of fear of the disgrace which Mrs. Clay’s “low” condition would
bring upon them all?There is
nothing about the latter possibility in what she says to Elizabeth; but it is
almost entirely in terms of rank that she is answered, inheritance as such being
relegated almost to an afterthought.“‘Mrs.
Clay,’” Elizabeth tells Anne with warmth, “‘never forgets who she
is’” (35); more strongly than most people, “‘she reprobates all
inequality of condition and rank’”; and her sentiments upon marriage are in
this respect “‘particularly nice.’”The substance of the matter, though unstated in Anne’s approach, is
asserted by Elizabeth, and understood by both, to be the formidable barrier of
social decorum which they know to exist, and behind which, presumably, they
should feel themselves secure.

Upon
that bulwark, the visit Anne was to make to Mrs. Smith is nothing less than a
formal assault: a clear defiance of established custom.And not without due deliberation and caution is it
undertaken.From the personal
viewpoint, Anne was confident of not being grossly in error.Apart from intervening misfortunes since they had last seen each other,
Mrs. Smith had strong claims upon her in her present crippled state, and in that
past kindness when Anne had returned to school grieving over her mother’s
death, “which had considerably lessened her misery, and could never be
remembered with indifference” (152).These
considerations, however, were in themselves not enough: in an affair of such
moment, it was needful to have recourse to an elder’s experience and
principle, and Anne applied to Lady Russell.Her judgment was favourable: Anne’s youthful friendship, the then Miss
Hamilton’s comfortable circumstances and her subsequently becoming the wife of
a man of fortune, as well as charitable concern for an invalid, sufficiently
militated against her present penniless condition for Anne to renew acquaintance
with her.But Lady Russell’s
preparedness to convey her “as near to Mrs. Smith’s lodgings in Westgate
Buildings, as she chose to be taken” betokens the equivocal nature of
the proceeding in the minds of both ladies (153).A stern critic – and what is more, a fair and impartial one – might
see in it an apprehension lest the coach and its owner should be so sullied by
that proximity as to be in need of the month’s ablution which Elizabeth
irreverently imagined Mr. Darcy would resort to, in order that he might be
cleansed from the impurities of Gracechurch Street were he once to enter it (PP
141).

But
this time Lady Russell’s judgment had been sound.Once the awkwardness and emotion of the first moments have
faded, Mrs. Smith is, for Anne, still as much the lady of her remembrance as Mr.
Elliot is the gentleman when she first sets eyes on him.Yet she has not been without trepidation as to what change intervening
years and events might have brought about in her erstwhile friend.Happily, we are informed, as the meeting progressed, Anne finds in Mrs.
Smith “the good sense and agreeable manners which she had almost ventured to
depend on” (153).The implication of verb and adverb conjoined surely is
testimony to the existence in Anne Elliot of apprehensions regarding the
enterprise she was engaged upon, not so very far removed from Sir Walter’s
own.But swiftly they have been
done away.It cannot be said at
this point that she has crossed the Rubicon of social decorum; but she is now at
least safely over one of its lesser tributaries.

For
what would have been her feelings if Sir Walter had recklessly launched himself
across this fateful waterway with regard to Mrs. Clay, and grandly set foot upon
the opposite bank?Would they not
have amounted to such dismay as afflicted Emma Woodhouse at the thought of Mr.
Knightley married to Harriet Smith?

Such
an elevation on her side!Such a
debasement on his! - It was horrible to Emma to think how it must sink him in
the general opinion, to foresee the smiles, the sneers, the merriment it would
prompt at his expense; the mortification and disdain of his brother, the
thousand inconveniences to himself. (413)

For
any self-respecting gentleman such things would be sufficiently daunting.But for an individual as considerate of his dignity as Sir Walter Elliot,
they would assume tragic proportions.

But
what of the subject of “elevation,” which also exercises
Miss Woodhouse’s mind?Who, let
the question be asked, being in social terms a nobody, is to be seen in the
novels as achieving acceptability and bliss?Addressing this question, we find ourselves embarked upon a rather barren
quest.There are, for a start, very
few persons so identifiable.

Edmund
Bertram, humble as his ambitions and his finances are, is not a candidate: the
younger son of a baronet, with a very good living kept for him thereabouts, as
Miss Crawford has not failed to notice, cannot be so described. Nor can the
well-born Edward Ferrars, who, after rejecting the choice of a Parliamentary or
military career, finds himself arbitrarily disinherited, but is thereafter
moderately redeemed through the unexpected gift of a living. A similar calamity
had befallen Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, heiresses of a wealthy old country
family unfairly cut out through a trick of senility in their grandfather; but by
the end they both have fared tolerably well, their establishments, while far
from equal in affluence, being fortunately within thirty miles of each other.

Charles
Hayter, though, is at first sight a different case, for his family were not
people of any consequence. “‘And, pray, who is Charles Hayter?’” Mary
Musgrove asks.“‘Nothing but a
country curate. A most improper match for Miss Musgrove, of Uppercross’”
(76). But Mary is being rather too severe, as her husband points out to her. He
admits “‘It would not be a great match for Henrietta”; but Mary is
overlooking the fact that Charles Hayter has “‘a very fair chance, through
the Spicers, of getting something from the Bishop’” in due course, and that,
elder son as he is, upon the death of his father “‘he steps into very pretty
property’” in the estate at Winthrop and the farm near Taunton. And
“‘with that property,’” he concludes, “‘he will never be a
contemptible man. Good, freehold property.’”However much this assurance may be unwelcome to Mary, her cousin Charles
is unlikely to be despised by anyone other than herself.

Nor
is his being a mere curate a hindrance. The clergy in that age had the mild
distinction of being regarded as a class of sub-gentry, and tolerated as such,
so long, of course, as they did not give themselves unbecoming airs – or
otherwise, in the decorous words of Mr. Collins, “‘provided that a proper
humility of behaviour is at the same time maintained’” (PP 97).
Catherine Morland by this same standard deserves respect. True, she is only a
clergyman’s daughter; but her father is the possessor of two livings, and of
landed property which is to be his eldest son’s future inheritance; and
Catherine’s dowry of three thousand pounds, while not great, is respectable.

Catherine’s
dowry, in fact, is three times the amount of Elizabeth Bennet’s, and this
sober truth brings into sharp question the matter of the latter’s
status. Leaving her
mother out of the reckoning, Elizabeth has the indubitable claim of being a
gentleman’s daughter. But since Mr. Bennet’s estate of two thousand per
annum is entailed from the female line, she is in practical terms all but
dowerless: a consideration which, as Mr. Collins hatefully but correctly advises
her, will “‘in all likelihood undo the effects of your loveliness and
amiable qualifications’” and make it “‘by no means certain that another
offer of marriage may ever be made you’” (108). The inferiority of her
social position not only calls forth Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s unmitigated
horror, but creates those “scruples” and provokes those “struggles” in
Mr. Darcy so calculated to nullify the import of his declaration of love,
despite his guileless insistence upon their being “natural and just” in a
man of his eminence. Neither they nor the reflection they constitute finally
prevent Elizabeth becoming mistress of Pemberley; but that development is a
notable elevation, and her claim to social distinction, personable in every
other respect though she is, has only marginally been admissible.

Whether
her claim is as strong as that ofSense
and Sensibility’s
Mrs. Jennings is not easily determined.

Mr.s
Jennings never can have been, as Elizabeth is even in the eyes of Lady
Catherine, “a very genteel, pretty kind of girl” (PP 163): pretty or
not, she was and remains incurably vulgar. We learn from John Dashwood
that, as we might have guessed, she is “‘the widow of a man who got all his
money in a low way’” (228); but to this material detail must be added
Elinor’s serious caution to her mother, that “‘she is not a woman whose
society can afford us pleasure, or whose protection will give us
consequence’” (156). Yet in both respects, Miss Dashwood proves to be
mistaken. Since her husband’s death, Mrs. Jennings has taken to spending every
winter “in a house in one of the streets near Portman-square,” which, with
her style of living, indicates an exceedingly good income (153); and, of more
importance, her decency and warmth of heart so affect Elinor as to promote a
highly unlikely but very firm friendship between them. Ill-bred, in her
son-in-law’s forthright and uncalled-for estimation, and Elinor’s unspoken
one, Mrs. Jennings may be; but, all things considered, her obvious wealth and
the irrefutable facts that one of her daughters is a Lady Middleton, and the
other the wife of a Member of Parliament, will procure for her the complaisance
of those she comes in contact with.

Quite
who the former Miss Hamilton’s husband Mr. Smith was—besides a man who at
his death left his affairs in such confusion and his wife unprovided for—we
are not to learn. His easiness of temper and “not strong understanding” had,
as Anne Elliot gathers, between them kept him from retaining his fortune; yet
that it had been considerable is evident from his widow’s title to property in
the West Indies, long “under a sort of sequestration for the payment of its
own encumbrances” (P 210), which Captain Wentworth finally recovers for
her. The ensuing “improvement of income,” together with some return of
health, will, as well as creating in Mrs. Smith “a spring of felicity,”
ensure the justification of any essay to resume her former social standing –
and discontinuance, it need not be said, of her residence in Westgate Buildings
(252).

No
such happiness does Willoughby gain or merit. For the wife who has freed him
from his “dread of poverty” and conviction of “the necessity of riches”
he comes to have unmeasured contempt. The fierce determination in one living
above his income to make his fortune by marriage is understandable, though
scarcely pardonable, by the young woman he has jilted. Success of a kind he
attains; bliss most emphatically he does not. But in all his actions, good and
bad alike, he is seen to exemplify the manner and style of a gentleman. So also
is the cultured Henry Crawford, more fortunate in that money-making need not be
one of his preoccupations.Along with his captivating sister, Henry Crawford is at the
center of happenings at Mansfield Park.Their
becoming involved in failure is the outcome of faults of character, and not
related to their assured position in society.

Life,
of course, will always have its casualties, even amongst the privileged and
advantaged of Jane Austen’s novels. Within the ranks of her commoners,
however, it is a matter of adversity and mischance almost unrelieved. Which of
them is not at the end by social definition a casualty; which of them can be
said to have come to good, to have progressed into acceptance, and achieved the
dignified pleasures and eligibilities consequent upon it? Alas, it is not the
artless Harriet Smith, who is finally hustled away and finds her proper place as
the wife of Farmer Martin – to Emma’s infinite relief, and with the dubious
distinction of having been in love with three different men in a single year.
The ultimate fates of the underbred John and Isabella Thorpe are not vouchsafed
to us; but they are something of as small concern to ourselves as to the
novelist, and we may be assured will have nothing at all prepossessing about
them.

If
it were only for the extensive role he plays, George Wickham would appear more
favourably destined. But he has been granted the not insignificant advantages of
being brought up at Pemberley, educated at Cambridge, and intended for the
Church; and in manners and address he is in no way inferior to Pemberley’s
present owner. His being the son of the late Mr. Darcy’s steward is no more
disabling to the reader than it is to Elizabeth Bennet when Caroline Bingley
laughingly apprises her of it. Nor indeed is it a factor in the estimation of
most persons the novel introduces us to, not excluding that of Fitzwilliam Darcy
himself, if we accept his explanations. Yet by the end, Wickham is revealed as
liar, slanderer, philanderer, and gamester.He is, in the author’s words, “one of the most worthless young men in
Great Britain” (PP 308).

In
descent, Mrs. Clay is Wickham’s equal; and her deservings and final repute may
be thought to be almost a reflection of his own. For her course through events
is sustained by pretence and artifice, she evokes no good opinion, and contrives
eventually to shock and mortify Sir Walter and Elizabeth, having failed in her
main endeavour to become the wife of the one and mother-in-law of the other.
What is to lie beyond for her is outside the novel’s scope. We last hear of
her as being established under Mr. Elliot’s protection in London, there
abandoned to the unsavoury process of “wheedling and caressing” him into
making her the next Lady Elliot. Succeed she may; but the inference through all
we have seen of her association with the persons of the novel, and particularly
that person who is its heroine, is that she does not deserve to.

A
distinct success, though one similarly unbeseeming, may be thought to have
occurred in Lucy Steele’s securing the foolish Robert Ferrars as her husband. Certain it is that she gains, with him, both fortune
and favor with her mother-in-law and her friends the John Dashwoods. But
in terms of the ensuing relationships, domestic and other, Lucy’s victory is
rather to be viewed as of the Pyrrhic sort, and the marriage itself as little
other than a merited penalty.

Upon
two, perhaps three, persons who are nobodies can good fortune and approval by
all the standards of Jane Austen’s novels be seen to descend. The instances
share a vital common element, and in one only is it not obvious.

Fanny
Price, at the age of ten transplanted to Mansfield Park, appears to bear the
brunt of a social system’s severity. Uppermost in her uncle Sir Thomas
Bertram’s mind is “‘the distinction proper to be made’” between the
newcomer and his own daughters as they grow up, the line of conduct which will
always “‘make her remember that she is not a Miss Bertram’” (10).
So little have her interests been regarded, seemingly, that when she has reached
her eighteenth year it is unclear to the Bertrams, and anyone of inquiring
disposition, whether or not she is “out”; and she herself has never presumed
to consider the subject.

At
Mansfield Park, there are a number of circumstances helpful to Fanny. She has
had at her disposal all the appurtenances of dignified living which a great
household can bestow – an immense boon, in comparison with the meagre
conditions Emma Watson must compromise with. The behavior of Maria and Julia
Bertram can only confirm Fanny’s innate shyness; but upon their departure from
Mansfield she is left “the only young woman in the drawing-room,” her
consequence at home and at the Parsonage increasing to the extent of her having,
at the latter, to fulfil the demands of being the principal lady in company
(205).

In
her endeavour constantly to keep before Fanny the thought of “who and what she
is,” her aunt is nothing but an affliction. Relief comes from Sir Thomas’s
growing realization that blood is thicker than water. Mrs. Norris’s forbidding
a fire in the East Room is in course of time made good by him, and her indignant
attempt to deny her a coach to the Grants is met with the calm rebuke: “‘My
niece walk to a dinner engagement at this time of the year! Will twenty minutes
after four suit you?’” (221). Though a commoner, Fanny is at least a
well-connected one – a condition the author herself was not unfamiliar with.
Sir Thomas begins at length to feel proud of Fanny. He is not under her aunt’s
illusion that her beauty is attributable to her upbringing at Mansfield; but
“he was pleased with himself for having supplied everything else; –
education and manners she owed to him” (276). His protégée differs entirely
from Harriet Smith in being an excellent recipient of benefits: she possesses
that vivacity of mind which, as Anne Elliot so well appreciates, is the height
of attraction in a handsome woman.

Yet
these not inconsiderable advantages do not of themselves promote the happiness
Fanny attains: it is her association with the Navy which is to bring her to
distinction. But for midshipman William Price’s coming, Sir Thomas would never
have realized the possibilities in his niece. He encounters in young Price
“frank, unstudied, but feeling and respectful manners” (233); but the effect
of their naturalness upon Fanny is a release and joyous flowering “which Sir
Thomas could not but observe with complacency” (234). He is moved repeatedly
to call on William to recount his experiences at sea, his chief object being
“to know the young man by his histories”; the qualities that become evident
in the narrator gain him nothing less than Sir Thomas’s esteem.

Thus,
when William asks Sir Thomas a question he cannot answer—“‘Is not Fanny a
very good dancer, sir?’” (250)—the outcome – extraordinary for the
demesne of sobriety at Mansfield Park has been – is that approving
determination to satisfy her brother’s wish to see her dance.Sir Thomas decrees, to Fanny’s initial horror, that “she was
to lead the way and open the ball” (275) as “the Queen of the evening”
(267). What in her humility she finds almost overpowering is not the situation
in the ballroom, but the thought of the honour accorded her.

She
could hardly believe it. To be placed above so many elegant young women! The
distinction was too great. It was treating her like her cousins! (275)

The
ball at Mansfield scarcely marks the end of Fanny’s trials and anxieties, but
it establishes her in possession of those social privileges which will make
possible her eventual achievement of a long despaired-of goal.

Captain
Frederick Wentworth is no scion of the Strafford family; and neither he nor his
friend Captain Benwick is a gentleman in the strict term which Sir Walter Elliot
applies to Wentworth’s clergyman brother, Edward. Not surprising are the
strong grounds of objection the baronet must entertain towards the Navy: it is
an institution by which all proper considerations of social decorum are
disregarded, and anomalies of nefarious kind perpetrated. It is a means, he
declares, “‘of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction, and
raising men to honours which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt
of’” (19) – and men, to boot, who have been “‘all knocked about, and
exposed to every climate, and every weather, till they are not fit to be
seen’” (20). From the latter charge, Wentworth is providentially spared; and
as to the former, he may hug himself. For Jane Austen, the Navy is the realm
where the artificialities of her society are blown asunder and scattered, where
true merit is revealed: the proving ground of courage, worth, and, yes,
nobility. It is a small world in itself – but yet a world apart, removed in
concept, as literally by distance, from the outlook and standards of the great
and assured social order beneath whose dominance her own life was played out,
and to whose enabling impositions she, with all those whom she knew, must ever
yield.

In
his Memoir, written in the year 1870, James Austen-Leigh suggested that
the reason for his aunt’s laying aside The Watsons was that she had

become
aware of the evil of having placed her heroine too low, in such a position of
poverty and obscurity as, though not necessarily connected with vulgarity, has a
sad tendency to degenerate into it; and therefore, like a singer who has begun
on too low a note, she discontinued the strain. (296)

The
thought comes to us from an epoch much closer to Jane Austen’s than ours, and
by the hand of a nephew who might with delicacy be presenting as a surmise of
his own, intimations from acquaintance with the writer herself. It is therefore
deserving of attention.

In
citing these words, however, Elizabeth Jenkins admits herself unimpressed by
them. “One cannot feel that this reason is a convincing one,” she comments,
“if only because Emma Watson is shown to such triumphant advantage in the
poverty and obscurity of her home.” But, as the evidence of the novels taken
together, and particularly of Persuasion, may lead us to conjecture,
might it not be precisely because of that achievement in Emma Watson, so at
variance with the assumptions and mood of those times, that Jane Austen found
herself obliged to leave the work unfinished? That, despite all her insights and
promptings as to the meretricious character of “place,” and the primacy of
human worth, it was not in her nature to become the prophet of change to her
contemporaries and her own intimates: to venture into territory untrodden by the
polite authors of her day, or admit even to herself such daunting possibility?

For
this same cause (if we are at liberty to apply the phrase she used of herself as
an historian) she makes her Anne Elliot resolutely “partial and prejudiced”
– not to say “ignorant” – in her treatment of Mrs. Clay. Though never
approaching the directness of Edmund Bertram in declaring a commoner’s being
on equal terms “an evil,” Anne is at one with him, and with Emma Woodhouse,
in the simple practice of looking down upon those beneath them: an implicit
belief that it is a propensity beyond question, in itself a rightness, and, in
the social context, a modest but undeniable virtue. It is a tenet which Emma has
painfully to re-learn after her escapade with Harriet Smith; but Anne Elliot, as
the very pattern of the ladylike – of feminine “goodness,” as the age
understood, and Jane Austen acknowledged, it – is incapable of a lapse of the
sort.

In
the character of Emma Woodhouse, and that of Emma Watson, and in the fortunes of
such as Harriet Smith and Penelope Clay, we may see the
externalization of a conflict deep within the author’s being: a clash between
an instinctive revolt against the pretensions and oppressiveness of “place,”
and a compulsive adherence to it as the basis of decorum, agreeableness and
elegance. And since, for Jane Austen, these opposites must remain always locked
in combat, so their struggle can find vigorous expression, but not resolution,
in the novels’ world. The presence of a Mrs. Clay can but prompt in Jane
Austen the conviction aroused in Hamlet by a Claudius enthroned in Denmark, that
“It is not nor it cannot come to good” (I.ii.158). Like the usurper, Mrs.
Clay can appear to her only as a threatening intruder into what was a previously
settled milieu – as much so, perhaps, as was the social upstart Wickham
beneath Caroline Bingley’s contemptuous gaze.

Thus,
it comes about that Anne Elliot is poorly placed for true judgment of Mrs. Clay.
This is not to deny the constancy of her attention and watchfulness. Mrs.
Clay’s recognition in Bath of the knock at ten o’clock being that of Mr.
Elliot receives her notice – though Mrs. Clay’s recognition of that knock
might have told Anne more than it does. She is instantly aware of anything
signified by the direction of the eyes. Mrs. Clay’s encouraging the notion of
a liking for Elizabeth in Mr. Elliot is picked up through the look the women
exchange when the frequency of his visits is under discussion. Nor does it elude
Anne that Mrs. Clay should steal a glance at her sister and herself, when she is
being so very earnestly complimented by Sir Walter upon her fine mind. But what
escapes her is at least as much as what does not – and more remarkably so.
That Mrs. Clay “thought it advisable to leave the room” while Sir Walter
delivers his vilification of the Smiths is obvious to them all (158).Anne “left it to himself to recollect,
that Mrs. Smith was not the only widow in Bath between thirty and forty, with
little to live on, and no surname of dignity.”This knowledge is strongly present in Anne, while evidently absent from
the other two. But its not bringing her to realize the blow it must have been to
the lady’s hopes of Sir Walter, and the acuteness of the distress it will have
caused, is more than surprising.

It
can be held that literary necessity has demanded her imperception here: that an
Anne Elliot conscious at this early stage of Mrs. Clay’s attempt upon her
father having been thwarted, or being unlikely to succeed, would mean an
intensification of the coming rivalry between the two for Mr. Elliot’s
attention.This would give Mrs. Clay greater prominence, and would take from the novel much of
what it gains from the manoeuvring with respect to Sir Walter that she and Mr.
Elliot are later presumed to be engaged upon. This may well be; but the effect
inevitably is to remove from Anne the sense of the effectualness of that very
principle of rank which her every feeling otherwise sustains: which would
lighten, if not entirely cure, in her the “plague” of Mrs. Clay’s
presumptions.

Is
it appropriate, after this telling incident, that she should be made to persist
in apprehending her father’s “debasement”? We may call in evidence
Bingley’s protest, in face of his sisters’ derision, that if Elizabeth and
Jane Bennet “‘had uncles enough to fill all Cheapside, . . it would
not make them one jot less agreeable,’” and his being silenced by Darcy’s
unanswerable rejoinder, that “‘it must materially lessen their chance of
marrying men of any consideration in the world’” (PP 37). Exactly the
same affirmation had been made to Anne by the sister who, being “very
handsome, and very like” Sir Walter, had always gone on “most happily”
with him. Elizabeth had expressed herself on the subject with complete
conviction. Her choosing to have Mrs. Clay so much with her might be questioned,
she concedes, if she were a very beautiful woman; “‘not that any thing in
the world, I am sure,” she continues, “‘would induce my father to make a
degrading match; but he might be rendered unhappy’” (P 35). Just so.
Is it conceivable that one so aware of the blessing of his irreproachable
pedigree and exalted position, having such a profound contempt for commoners and
commonness as he had had fortuitous occasion to deliver himself of, to the
company’s reticence and the reader’s delight, would in defiance of all logic
and expectation proceed to woo and wed a Mrs. Clay? His daughter Anne clearly
thinks he might be fool enough, just as the “imaginist” Emma thought the far
lesser Mr. Knightley might be, with respect to Harriet. Emma was entirely
mistaken; why should Anne not also be? Why should she, and we, be so ready to
dismiss Elizabeth’s judgment on an issue of this kind as unsound?

Mrs.
Clay herself might have reason to think that her attempt upon Sir Walter is
still not hopeless. But that she has greater cause at this point to revise her
endeavours at Camden Place may be deduced from a feature of her conduct whose
presence Anne notices, but whose significance, once more, escapes her. She
identifies as suspect in Mr. Elliot his contriving to please all in that house,
despite the tempers of its occupants being so various. She notes that
Mr. Elliot “had appeared completely to see what Mrs. Clay was about, and to
hold her in contempt; and yet Mrs. Clay found him as agreeable as any body”
(161). Anne’s observation about Mr. Elliot’s motives is sound; but it leaves
aside any inclination in Mrs. Clay which the fact may denote. She does, indeed,
seem not to dislike the man.

The
next instance of this kind presents itself with
such suddenness, and is so involving, that Anne is in the thick of the fray
before she has had a moment to reflect upon what is happening. It is
precipitated by nothing more than a slight drizzle of rain in Milsom Street; but
the consequence could not be more marked. Shelter in Lady Dalrymple’s carriage
being the undoubted privilege of Miss Elliot, the remaining seat is at the
disposal of one of the other two ladies of the party. Correctly, and politely as
ever, Mrs. Clay offers Anne the place: “her civility,” Jane Austen writes
with meaning, “rendered her quite as anxious to be left to walk with Mr.
Elliot, as Anne could be” (174). The point is disputed between them with “a
generosity so polite, and so determined”, in fact – the rain to each being
only a trifle, and Mrs. Clay affirming her boots to be “much thicker than Miss
Anne’s” – that it can only be settled by outside agency.Miss Elliot maintains that Mrs. Clay has a cold, and Mr. Elliot
“decid[es] on appeal, that his cousin Anne’s boots were rather the
thickest” (175). What is obvious to the reader from this skirmish, and can
only be so to Anne, is the strong desire in Mrs. Clay to be with Mr. Elliot; yet
from this open rivalry Anne appears to make no deduction as to the state of the
other’s affections.Is this
because she is assured of Elliot’s preference, reflected in his decision? Or
because she regards Mrs. Clay as too far beneath them to be worth considering?
Or, what is more likely, is the entire incident driven from her mind the very
next instant, by the sight of Captain Wentworth walking down the street?

Two
things are at least clear. Jane Austen will not use what has happened in Milsom
Street to do anything that would put Mrs. Clay on a level with Anne,
romantically speaking. And Mrs. Clay has learned from Mr. Elliot’s action that
he has more interest in Anne than in herself: an encouragement, perhaps a much
needed one, for her not to lose sight of the baronet. Perhaps with this in mind,
she does not neglect to foster belief in Elizabeth that she is Mr. Elliot’s
object; but it is to be noted that her doing so will at the same time allow her
to give innocuous expression to that pleasure she finds in his immediacy which
all her composure otherwise might not be able to mask.

Mrs.
Clay is, needless to say, together with Sir Walter and his two daughters when,
the earliest of their party for the concert, they take their position by one of
the fires in the Octagon Room. Almost immediately, Captain Wentworth enters
alone.Boldly, Anne steps towards
him, and there follows between them a conversation which, despite the door’s
slam and the “ceaseless buzz of persons walking through” (183), could not
fail to impress the others by its length and particularity. It is enough indeed
to gain for Wentworth the “simple acknowledgement of acquaintance” formally
bestowed on him by Sir Walter and Elizabeth; but it develops into that
near-declaration from him which renders Anne “struck, gratified, confused, and
beginning to breathe very quick, and feel a hundred things in a moment.”
Throughout the whole, Anne is too engrossed to have thought for Mrs. Clay: but
the reverse is not true. Mrs. Clay will have seen enough to give her a far
stronger hint than that which was afterwards to suffice for Mrs. Smith, that it
is not Mr. Elliot who holds the key to Anne’s heart.

But
what can she be thinking later, as she sits close to them on the “contiguous
benches” of the concert room, when the same Mr. Elliot is talking to Anne with
almost the same particularity, confusing her with his flattery, professing in low tones an acquaintance with her
character long before she came to Bath. He gains her curiosity and eager
questioning, until interruption comes from the exchange between Lady Dalrymple
and Sir Walter, and the rearrangement of their party. And, later still, when
Captain Wentworth again approaches, this time hesitantly, and is held in
conversation by Anne for a while, only to walk off abruptly at the moment, she
is touched on the shoulder by Mr. Elliot making a request? Mrs. Clay is now
sufficiently in the secret of Anne’s affections to know, with gratification,
that Mr. Elliot’s chance with her is more doubtful; and she is conscious that
Anne is perfectly unaware, amidst the revelations and emotions the evening has
brought her, of having betrayed much of her innermost feelings.

It
is but a matter of hours before Anne, sitting with her friend in Westgate
Buildings, is gaining information as decisive about the heart of Mr. Elliot and
his business in Bath. The mystery of his eagerness to be reconciled to Sir
Walter, and of his constant attendance at Camden Place, is resolved: all has
been brought about through “‘a very material change in Mr. Elliot’s
opinions as to the value of a baronetcy’” (206), and what has become for him
the vital need to head off from its present possessor the advances of the
“‘clever, insinuating, handsome woman, poor and plausible,’” according
to Mrs. Smith, who is laying siege to its honors. But this estimate of Mrs. Clay
is from appearances only, based on what she has gleaned from hearsay and report;
and so is the opinion that the threat is lessening, from Mrs. Clay’s awareness
that Elliot “sees through her, and not daring to do as she might do in his
absence.”The bulk of what Mrs.
Smith discloses having been proved accurate, it is not at all surprising that
Anne should take that part appertaining to Mrs. Clay as comprising the extent of
her purposes. Where she is at fault, if she is to be faulted, is in those
fundamental assumptions about Mrs. Clay’s deserving, or lack of it, which have
precluded comprehension of the person.That
inner screen of her own disdain, hindering any sympathy in approach, has limited
her discernment.

She
is nevertheless able almost without effort to identify Mrs. Clay’s pretences
– and obtain the reader’s approval in so doing. On her return home from
Westgate Buildings, she listens to the plentiful hints Mrs. Clay is giving
Elizabeth of Mr. Elliot’s regard for her; and the exaggerations and
affectations are as plain to Anne as they are repellent. But they also are no
more than externalities, and she cannot penetrate to what they hide: the design
upon Sir Walter is all that she manages, and, perhaps, cares, to grasp. Thus,
she will dismiss as good acting the pleasure now so evident in Mrs. Clay at the
knowledge that Mr. Elliot will be in the house the same evening; she can be even
perplexed by the thought that, while “Mrs. Clay must hate the sight of Mr.
Elliot,” she could yet “assume a most obliging, placid look, and appear
quite satisfied with the curtailed license of devoting herself only half as much
to Sir Walter as she would have done otherwise” (213-14). The possibility of
another explanation never crosses her mind: the little contretemps in Milsom
Street has evidently signified nothing.

Is
it at all probable, though, that an Anne Elliot, with her steadiness,
reflectiveness, and principle, can have been so often in error as to the conduct
of those around her, and blind in matters of dearest concern? For answer, we
have only to look at ourselves. Making wrong inferences from the ascertainable
facts is a common enough pursuit; and Jane Austen’s heroines are industriously
engaged upon it. We have for example but to think of Emma’s
surmisings about Jane Farifax’s
pianoforte, or Frank Churchill’s rescuing Harriet from the gypsies; of
Elizabeth Bennet, who has prided herself upon her discernment, “wretchedly
blind” to Darcy’s true character; of poor Catherine’s deductions from
General Tilney’s having discarded the portrait of his late wife; or Elinor’s
certainty as to what will follow from Colonel Brandon’s offering Edward a
living. Were lists to be made, it might even appear that, in terms of their more
important personal impressions, the heroines are nearly as much mistaken as not.

Perhaps
for them all, the explanation is that which may readily be given for Anne
Elliot: simply that she has been too full of her own affairs and emotions, her
yearnings, her qualms, her frustrations, and her fears. Why should they not be?
they are only human. Witness how distressing it is for Anne at this juncture to
see Mr. Elliot, painful to have him speak to her, and to be finding insincerity
in his every word and gesture. There is only one course of action open to her
now that she is convinced she has found him out: it is, while avoiding any
marked alteration of manners, “to be as decidedly cool to him as might be
compatible with their relationship, and to retrace, as quietly as she could, the
few steps of unnecessary intimacy she had been gradually led along” (214).
For, as she knew from the moment of her leaving Westgate Buildings, there was no
longer “any thing of tenderness” due to him – or anything, in fact, of the
least concern, politeness apart. But however delicately Anne may have conveyed
this disfavour, a “sensible, discerning mind” like Elliot’s will be
conscious of having experienced a rebuff. He might scarcely have seen Captain
Wentworth at Lyme, or in Milsom Street, and have paid little heed to him at the
concert; perhaps he would not yet suspect some new personal interest on Anne’s
part. But the change in her attitude to himself, and his sense of the clouding
of his prospect of success with her, will be unmistakable: and will give him
reason, and put him at liberty, to pursue a long-developing preference of his
own.

This
appears to be the reason for his absenting himself for a day or two from Sir
Walter’s house and its constraints, for a visit to Thornbury. Part of the
outcome is suddenly visible to the entire company at the White Hart, in the
phenomenon of his being observed under the colonnade by the corner with Bath
Street, “‘deep in talk’” with Mrs. Clay, as Mary Musgrove perceives
them, and then shaking hands (the sign of cordiality in near-strangers) as they
turn from each other in separate directions (222). On moving to the window upon
Mary’s insistence, Anne is, predictably, put to “checking the surprise which
she could not but feel at such appearance of friendly conference between two
persons of totally opposite interests” (223). After a toilsome walk back to
Camden Place, she is moved by no very generous impulse to let Mrs. Clay know of
her having been seen in Elliot’s company three hours after his supposedly
leaving Bath. All the satisfaction she gains is the impression of a flash of
guilt on her face, instantly cleared away, an over-long protestation from the
lady of having forgotten their meeting, and the supposition that, “by some
complication of mutual trick, or some overbearing authority of his,” she had
been obliged to listen to his “lectures and restrictions on her designs on Sir
Walter” (228). It is this totally false impression of hers that we are left
with: enlightenment at what has been going on between them, and about the real
state of Mrs. Clay’s affections, Anne Elliot is unable, and Jane Austen has
been unwilling, to provide for us.

Anything
further about the pair is made known through concluding narration. Anne’s
engagement to Wentworth frustrated any design Mr. Elliot had on Elizabeth, and
whatever may have been left of his plan to resume the watch upon Sir Walter
which “a son-in-law’s rights would have given him” (250). But his
“double game” in establishing Mrs. Clay in London reveals his determination
“to save himself from being cut out by one woman at least.” The account,
succinct as it is, is just; but can the same be said of Jane Austen’s final
words upon Mrs. Clay? That “she had sacrificed, for the younger man’s sake,
the possibility of scheming longer for Sir Walter” is true, so far as it goes;
but as to her affections having “overpowered her interest” in this resolve,
the question is how much of an interest, after the revelation of his
aristocratic pride, and of the next Sir Walter’s amorous inclination, he still
constituted for her. The last comment, perhaps fittingly, leaves her prospects
with Mr. Elliot as a subject for conjecture: but the laconic admission that Mrs.
Clay “has abilities, however, as well as affections” may be regarded as a
testimony to whatever, in her enforced reluctance, the author has left
unexplored or undivulged in this character.

For
her attitude throughout – only half-acknowledged, doubtless, even to herself
– is that the penniless daughter of a lawyer, however otherwise gifted in mind
and manners, is not to be viewed as acceptable by society’s norms, as they are
embodied in the novels, and were present by and large in the minds of
contemporary readers. Jane Austen has been anything but lavish in depicting Mrs.
Clay.The author has presented Mrs.
Clay to us largely through the critical eyes of her rival, and minimally, even
so. But the meeting with Mr. Elliot by the Pump Room shows that she had inspired
an attachment in him more certain and real than that for Anne Elliot, which he
had never got to the point of professing, despite his manifold attentions to
her. And from the little we do know of Mrs. Clay – from an appreciation we
come at length to share with her literary creator – she is by no means so
common as her name might suggest: and will display more elegance and true
personableness in her future role as Lady Elliot, than a Lady Dalrymple, or a
Lady Catherine de Bourgh, or a Lady Lucas, or a Lady Bertram, is able to bring
to her respective position in society. Not to mention Mrs. Ferrars.

Perhaps
this is what the disadvantaged rebel within Jane Austen was wanting to say as
part of the unwritten story in Persuasion. How much of it would have been
revealed, one wonders, if the first reference to the novel in her Letters, on 13
March 1817 – “I have a something ready for Publication, which may perhaps
appear about a twelvemonth hence” – was a hint of intended revision?